How To Make A Perfect Pastry For Your Pie...

It's all about the pastry. A good filling in a tough, greasy or soggy case is a wasted filling — and the difference between the two is rarely the recipe. Pastry is the same four ingredients almost every time: flour, fat, a little salt, and water to bind. What separates shortcrust from puff from hot water crust is just the ratio of fat to flour and how the two are combined.

Master those ratios and one rule of temperature, and every pie you make gets better. Here's the whole of it.

The one rule: keep everything cold

For shortcrust and puff, cold is the entire game. The fat needs to stay in solid pieces within the flour until the oven melts it — that's what creates the crumble in shortcrust and the layers in puff. Warm fat smears into the flour instead, and you get dense, greasy pastry however careful the rest of your technique was.

So: cold butter straight from the fridge, cold water (a couple of ice cubes in it does no harm), a cool worktop if you can manage it, and cool hands — running them under the cold tap for a minute before you start is an old baker's habit that works. Handle the dough as little as possible; every second of contact warms it.

Shortcrust pastry — the everyday workhorse

The most common pastry, and the most forgiving. The ratio is half fat to flour — so 100g of cold butter to 200g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, and just enough cold water to bring it together (2–3 tablespoons, added one at a time).

Rub the butter into the flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs, add the water gradually, and stop the moment the dough holds together. It isn't bread — don't knead it. Wrap it, chill it for at least 30 minutes, and it's ready to roll. The full method, applied to a proper batch of mince pies, is in our mince pie guide.

Shortcrust is also the one to experiment with:

• Half butter, half lard gives a richer, old-fashioned flavour and an even shorter texture.
• A little more fat makes it more luxurious — but only a little. Push the ratio too far and the dough becomes unworkable.
• A tablespoon of caster sugar turns it into sweet shortcrust for fruit pies and tarts.
• An egg yolk instead of some of the water enriches the flavour and colour.
• Flavour the flour: orange zest in a sweet shortcrust is excellent with apple pies; chopped thyme suits a chicken pie; a grind of black pepper lifts any savoury case.

Puff and rough puff — the flaky ones

Puff pastry rises in crisp layers because the fat is folded through the dough in sheets rather than rubbed in — the ratio here is equal fat to flour. In the oven, the water in the dough turns to steam, each layer of fat separates its neighbouring layers of dough, and the pastry lifts.

True puff is a project: repeated rolling, folding and chilling over a couple of hours. Rough puff gets you most of the way in a fraction of the time — cold butter in visible lumps, folded through the dough three or four times with a chill between folds. The layers are less regular, the flake is nearly as good, and it's the version most home bakers should actually make.

Puff suits pies with wet, generous fillings — chicken, turkey and ham, leek in white sauce — where a single lid of pastry over a pie dish is all you need. Don't line the dish with it; puff wants to rise, not hold walls. And go easy on the eggwash at the cut edges: sealed edges can't separate into layers.

Hot water crust — the hand-raised one

The odd one out, and the one that breaks all the cold rules on purpose. Hot water crust uses roughly a third fat to flour, but the fat (traditionally lard) is melted into boiling water and poured hot into the flour. The result is a warm, pliable dough that — unlike shortcrust — you do knead, then mould by hand or press into a tin while it's still warm.

This is the pastry for pork pies, game pies, and a proper steak and kidney pie: sturdy enough to stand on its own and hold a filling and its jelly without collapsing. It sets firm as it cools, which is why hand-raised pies keep their shape.

The flavour trick works here too: chopped sage in the pastry for a pork pie, or a teaspoon of Dijon mustard worked into the dough for anything with ham.

Which pastry for which pie?

The tin does the bottom half of the job

Every pastry on this page shares one enemy: the soggy bottom. Pastry crisps where it meets direct, confident heat, and it steams where it doesn't. Two pieces of kit settle it.

For small pies — mince pies, jam tarts, individual fruit pies — shallow cups put the pastry base close to the heat, which is exactly what our traditional mince pie tin (1.5cm cups) is shaped for. For a full-size pie in a dish, sit the dish on a flat metal tray that went into the oven with the preheat: the hot steel drives heat straight up through the dish base, and it catches any filling that bubbles over while it's at it.

The pastry baker's kit

Traditional 12 Cup Mince Pie Tin

£19.99

Shallow 1.5cm cups sit shortcrust right against the heat, so twelve small pies come out with crisp bases. Non-stick carbon steel.

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Swiss Roll Tin Baking Tray — 39cm x 27cm

£22.99

The preheated-tray trick under a pie dish: hot heavy steel crisps the base and catches the boil-overs. 10-year guarantee.

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Once the pie's out, the finishing touches are quick wins: the key-crimp trick and five more like it are in our six baking tips, the tins themselves will outlast the hobby if you follow the care and use guide, and everything in the range carries a 10-year guarantee.